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This man has acted like an animal.” In fact, Mario had only a vague idea of what the Butcher’s Boy had done, except that he had somehow managed to kill a large number of men and at the same time get Carlo Balacontano convicted of one of the murders, and Bala was still serving a life sentence for it and sending embarrassingly inflammatory reminders through channels to the outside, Mario watched Lucchi’s face as he exhausted his vocabulary. “He violated hospitality, threw loyalty out the window and made my uncle ashamed.”
    Lucchi’s eyes flickered in a faint reaction. Mack hoped that something in his stammered litany had meant something. “Si,” said Lucchi quietly. The Carpaccio brothers had not brought Lucchi to England to save him from the endemic poverty of Sicily, but from a sudden manhunt launched by the national police in Rome. When he had killed the banker Giovanni Parla in his bathtub it had been to expunge an insult Parla’s grandfather had committed against Lucchi’s grandmother before Lucchi’s father was born. And since Lucchi’s father had died attaching an oversensitive pipe bomb to a Parla’s automobile, Lucchi had not felt he could honorably stop there. After he had left Parla bleeding to death in the bathroom, he had gone to the other rooms of the house and killed the wife and two children. Now he said in English, “How do you want it done?”

 
    M eg pulled Schaeffer into the stands and sat him down in the center near the bottom. “Okay, Michael. Let’s appraise these horses. My system is to ascertain which are the tallest, and then place large wagers that they’ll win.”
    Schaeffer stared out at the broad green lawn. There were a few horses being exercised on the track, which was little more than a white railing cordoning off a portion of the expanse of grass that stretched from the road to the hills where buildings began. It wasn’t like American tracks, which were almost like freeways for horses, bordered by huge concrete structures for crowds of bettors, electronic tally boards and the subterranean bunkers where money was pushed through windows and machines pumped out tickets. He liked it. Things in England always seemed to him faintly amateurish. “I wonder what’s keeping the others.”
    “Jimmy’s always been like that about parking. He cares about machinery. Have I ever told you that’s something I like about you? You don’t care at all about machines.”
    “Are you sure you haven’t offended Peter?”
    “Positive.” She turned to him and gave him her most enigmatic smile. It looked so open and guileless that he knew it was a practiced artifice. “When we were young, he talked me into taking off my clothes—one garment at a time, of course. He took Polaroid pictures of me. I could see that I was beautiful from the first ones, and I got rather caught up in the whole thing, mainly from the pleasant surprise and narcissistic curiosity. So I kept unbuttoning things further, and letting the cloth slip lower to reveal a little more. When there was nothing left to take off, I found I wanted to see myself from angles I hadn’t seen. Peter still has the pictures, I’m sure. I was just reminding him that I remember too.”
    “Why do you tell these stories?” Schaeffer asked.
    “Because it should have happened,” she answered. “Or something should have. Something shameful and scandalous. In fact, we were a sad, gangling lot with running noses who were lonely and bored and cold most of the time, but were afraid to speak to each other. It would have been nice if something had happened, and if I tell it that way it will make it seem true. Who does it hurt?”
    “No one. I’m going to find them.”
    “What on earth for?”
    “So when we want to go home they’ll allow us in the car.”
    He stepped carefully down the wooden bleachers, then made his way through the people on the ground. As he had since he was young, he avoided looking straight into their eyes when he